This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
In my recent experience, it recommends shitty blogs loaded with adverts and keywords. Most annoyingly, it always recommends Fandom’s Wiki above better alternative wiki sites. My DuckDuckGo experience has surprisingly been more useful.
That aside, my Brother laser printer is still working great. No complaints.
My DuckDuckGo experience has surprisingly been more useful.
Yeah, right!? I remember that one or two years ago DDG was consistently worse than Google but recently Google's quality has dropped off a cliff. Now when I don't get the desired result in DDG and switch to Google, the results are usually just as bad or worse.
The only time google gets me better results than DDG now is if I have a really vague question, like “movie where the guy wears a trash bag on his leg and has a piña colada on the train to Milwaukee”
My DDG searches have been absolute garbage for the past few months. About 75% of the time I have to re-search my keywords on Google to actually get a relevant result.
It's bad enough that I'm about to switch back to Google.
That's not been my experience. I've been using DDG for years, and when I first switched I would occasionally have to go find something on Google instead. That slowly fell off as the years went by because going to Google and getting better search results became rarer and rarer. It's to the point now where I don't even do it, unless I need to look at something on street view.
I second this, this has been my experience exactly. It's gotten so bad that not only do I not need the Google fallback, but I'm starting to feel like the DDG results are better than the Google ones in the first place.
Unfortunately, this has also been my DuckDuckGo experience for several months. I wish it wasn’t
Most annoyingly, it always recommends Fandom’s Wiki above better alternative wiki sites.
use Indie Wiki Buddy extension to get rid of fandom.
https://getindie.wiki/
It has a partnership with bing. So sadly now it is mostly a bing clone. I have been using DDG for a decade. I noticed a distinct drop in search quality after the bing partnership.
If I'm looking up something general, like some actor or tv show, then DDG is perfect. If im troubleshooting some weird software issue then i find it doesnt always list as many results, as if it hasnt indexed as many sites.
DDG at least now means I can search random shit without it suddenly being inserted into my social media algorithms like some kind of psychological torture.
Oh my god the Fandom wiki for minecraft uses the same little tab icon as the actual minecraft wiki but it has a fucking "are you an adult or child" popup EVERY SINGLE TIME a page loads
I hate it so much
Use breezewiki extension. Redirects fandom articles to a frontend that removes their bullshit and replaces fandom with independant wikis when possible.
Immortal Tanks, those Brother printers. Best in the biz.
Strange how Google became the default search engine back in the day because they were so good at filtering out the dumb websites that just spam search terms all over the page.
They've regressed and become Yahoo
Not sure if you read the recent article or not, but the guy responsible for this enshittification came from Yahoo, where he applied the same policies. So you're more literally correct than you may think
Destroying search engines as a career...
Except there isn't much of a Google stealing their thunder. Bing isn't better. DDG isn't better.
Personally really like ddg over it though. Only gotta be more precise with keywording for finding what you need.
Reddit used to be better, but now any time you search for advice on good _____ to buy, the only answers you can find are "use the search function, this question has been answered already"
The demise of google search is by design. https://www.techspot.com/news/102765-who-prabhakar-raghavan-why-accused-killing-google-search.html TL;DR. Management noted that search revenue was not growing, so the head of google search Prabhakar Raghavan made it worse so you have to click more to get what you want. More clicks = more money = growth = happy investors = enshitification. Fuck you Prabhakar Raghavan.
Zitron, though, describes him as "a computer scientist class traitor who sided with the management consultancy sect."
Based
I really need to go through my old files and find The Screenshot from around 1999-2000. Basically, I searched for something in AltaVista and got back a page that was super chock full of ads and "portal crud". ...and a tiny little text that you really had to squint for, somewhere in the middle, that said there were no search results, actually. I got the strong impression that this search engine was fucked.
Sometimes Google's results are kind of starting to look like the same, except the crud is in the actual results. Which is something Google could do something about. I mean, they used to care about SEO spam.
There was an article about that recently. Apparently Marketing won the battle for control over Google Search. So it's no longer focused on quality of product.
From the article...
Don’t feel compelled to do it; my only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out.
I have to admit, it was an interesting read, not quite like anything I've ever read before, for a review.
I honestly can't tell if this is just some genius way of sliding in some AI generated content into a review and getting it to pass our review, or just an editor-in-chief really frustrated with Google's search algorithm paying attention to manipulation by others, so trying to really get their stuff out there for us to see.
Either way, it's definitely worth the read.
As far as Brother printers go, I own an all-in-one laser that's over a decade old, and it's still going strong. And it actually works with Linux to boot. I do hate though that they do some squirrely stuff to try to get you to buy a new toner cartridge early, but if you mask sensors and such, then an existing toner will work forever.
There are very few printers that don't work with Linux. Linux has drivers to interface with most of them through whatever means you like, right in the kernel.
That's one of the reasons my android phone (Linux kernel, remember) is better at finding and queuing up prints on a network printer than any windows machine I've ever used.
I just hit share on a document, choose print... And then it just works.
they do some squirrely stuff to try to get you to buy a new toner cartridge early
My Brother is newer than yours (the cheapest one I could get that prints on both sides of the paper), and has a setting to toggle how it behaves when toner is low.
The default is to pause printing until you replace the toner - honestly that's not entirely wrong. Having the printer run out of toner half way through an important print job could be a disaster.
The alternative mode is to just show a "low toner" warning badge whenever you print a document. That's what I use, but I also check if it printed properly before closing the document which a lot of people don't do. It looks like this:
As far as I know it's just a simple counter - how many pages have you printed since it was replaced. Obviously that's never going to be particularly accurate.
Google used to list sites with backlinks highly, it was their first ever search algorithm iirc. Once people learned you could game that by planting useless backlinks, Google realised it was a bad idea.
Somehow, they've reinvented this all over again with parasite SEO that fundamentally works the same way. All they did was add some "domain ranking". Now, unreliable-but-popular sites coughredditcough will always score highly regardless of quality, because Google deemed them superior.
reddit is a very good search resource though because it has 15 years of real people giving real information. I imagine reddit from here on out will be going hard on the enshitification train so it's value as a search resource will rapidly decline.
Anything post-2022, and probably post-2020, is suspect on Reddit because it became abundantly clear how steerable it was and how easy to generate sales as long as you didn't do anything too "suspicious". Current 'ad guides' tell advertisers not to link things because just saying the name reads as more authentic.
Before that it was legitimately people discussing, e.g., the best flashlight for x-y-z purposes. But a decent amount of old stuff has been gutted by people deleting their posts/accounts.
Can confirm, it's still the top result under the sponsors. And it's an amusing read.
With the prevalence of reddit google was of the most useful tools I've seen in my 40 years on earth. Only to go to absolute shit in the last 2-3 years.
Best breadcrumb from article:
I wanted to understand: what kind of human spends their days exploiting our dumbest impulses for traffic and profit? Who the hell are these [SEO/Google] people making money off of everyone else’s misery?
Missing the days of Consumer Reports. I think the velocity of new products is too high for them to be relevant for more than a few months once they release a report anymore.
I still sign up with them when I’m researching bigger, or long-lasting, purchases. Cars, washing machine, and that sort of thing. I’m always a little annoyed at the price, but the content is SO MUCH better than any other online review source that I’m always happy with my decision in the end. Reddit comments are probably second, but I’ve found those to be littered with what seem to me to be suspiciously positive reviews for items that are not significantly better than their competition. I feel like I need to dial up my critical nature to 10 to fight against the echo chamber and/or the covert advertising.
I get Consumer Reports free through my library. You may too!
This was actually a very funny read.
Also yes, Brother printers are the best because they actually work.
Sigh. So many things in the world are like this. It’s not a bad idea, in theory, to favor more recent pages in search results. Finding 4 year old information is often not what you want. But in practice, when everyone knows this bias exists, they just fiddle with their pages daily to try to fool the algorithm. It must be aggravating to be Google, because as smart as they are, the entire world is engaged in an unending and ruthless quest to game their results for personal gain.
The next good search engine will unironically be a Microsoft chatbot of some kind
yes i also noticed google search is absolute trash lately. so i switched to searx and life is better. i only go to google for street view and reverse image search now.
For the record though, I used bing for the duration of 2023, sort of as an experiment to use the ai assistant.
Bing search is worse that Google by a long shot. I almost always gave up and used Google.
Omg I can't believe they used AI to write this article 😡
my only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out.
Y'all mfs didn't read the article lmao
Give SearxNG a try. There are browser plugins available for it. I was using Librey but I'm finding SearxNG to be better.
